This application claims priority to Korean Patent Application No. 2004-52603, filed on Jul. 7, 2004, in the Korean Intellectual Property Office, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein in its entirety by reference.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to electronic devices with a camera such as a mobile phone, and more particularly, to performing a fingerprint security function in such an electronic device.
2. Description of the Related Art
The present invention is described for mobile phones as an example electronic device. However, features of the present invention may be used in other types of electronic devices with a built-in camera.
Recently, mobile phones include various functions aside from the simple calling function, such as photographing or moving picture filming functions, Internet functions, and radio or MPEG-1 layer 3 (MP3) audio file reproducing functions. As such, the importance of personal information security is increasing. Personal information security is especially important for mobile phones having functions with valuable personal information such as in case of banking via the Internet.
To protect such personal information in a conventional security mechanism, a user inputs a pre-registered password whenever the user wants to access a specific function of the mobile phone that requires security protection. However, such use of the password may not be safe because anyone who inputs the password can access such a function.
Thus, more recent security mechanisms use physiological information of a user. In that case, a user is authenticated using a physiological feature of the user for a higher level of security. Examples of such physiological information include a fingerprint or an iris of the user. Since fingerprints and irises are different for each person, such features are the first physiological information to be used in security systems. Particularly, the fingerprint is the most widely used because the fingerprint recognition rate by a fingerprint recognition device is high and because such a physiological feature is easy to use.
Meanwhile, in a mobile phone with a digital camera in the prior art, a lens of the digital camera is fixed appropriately to take portrait or landscape pictures, and thus a fingerprint cannot be photographed. Therefore, in order for a conventional mobile phone with a digital camera to photograph a fingerprint, an additional mechanism for recognizing the fingerprint needs to be added therein. For example, U.S. Patent Application No. 2002/0083329 discloses an additional fingerprint reading unit with an additional lens system that is placed onto the existing camera unit of an electronic device for capturing the fingerprint image.
In such prior art electronic devices, the size of the mobile phone will increase because space to include the additional fingerprint-recognizing mechanism is required. Also, since a mobile phone having a fingerprint-recognizing mechanism cannot be manufactured on a conventional mobile phone production line, an additional production line to manufacture the additional fingerprint-recognizing mechanism is needed. As a result, the cost of the mobile phone will increase.